Party photo printer built around a Raspberry Pi

We think [Brian Delacruz] latched on to a good idea with this photo printer project. Instead of building a big photo booth for his party he developed a Raspberry Pi based WiFi photo printer. Right now it’s a prototype that lacks the kind of polish necessary to make a true user-friendly device. But the idea is solid and just waiting for you to improve upon it.

In addition to the RPi he’s using a quality photo printer and a small wireless router. The router simply provides WiFi capabilities for the RPi which is running a web server, mySQL, and FTP. This provides a wide range of upload options which he can work with. Watch the video after the break to see him print a smart phone photo wirelessly.

This can be simplified by using a package like hostapd to use a USB WiFi dongle as an access point. Or if the venue already has Internet access a server could be set up with a QR code to guide people to it. The party starts off with an empty bulletin board and guests would be invited to print and hang their own photos which will go into the host’s guest book/scrap book to remember the event.

Apart from the ability to add an overlay, there’s not a lot that cannot already be accomplished with off-the-shelf-devices and firmware.
Print from an iPhone? Get an AirPrint-compatible printer. Print from a camera? Lots of photo printers come with a USB host port and a card reader. Smartphone? Chances are it’ll act like a camera when plugged in.
It’s nice that this solution supports virtually all devices that can upload a picture via a web form or ftp client. However, I imagine that it could become quite tedious if one wanted to print more than two or three pictures. Also, the device needs to provide internet access to it’s users.

This is a pretty cool idea. My brother-in-law got a raspberry PI just recently, but he doesn’t even have a printer attached to his PC. Once it goes through some stages of development, this might be good to look into.